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It can be profitable, but not often enough for most players to bother with. If you target buying Iron Fittings at around 400 gold each, then haul them over to a 'consuming' port that's paying 500 gold each, you can make some money. The trick is to do this during the short window before the port stops buying again, and to wait for a good price.
In practice this will almost never actually happen which is why I say the Sell Price will be "stuck" at 1. Regardless of what the design intent might have been, the actual outcome is "big profits for the first person to dump mass quantities on a port" followed by "no profit for anyone else ever". There actually is another way to squeeze profits out of a non-consuming port, but you need to have a lot of money to do it -- enough that you probably wouldn't need more anyway.

The forums are working properly for me again (on both my computer and my phone). I didn't change anything on my end but whatever the issue was seems to be fixed now.
This is what it looked like for me while I was having problems (now that the problem is gone I can actually upload this):

Only some ports consume materials. Those 'consuming' ports that have a Sell Price of 1 will eventually start buying again at a more 'normal' price, although it may take a long time (Bonacca for example will probably take around 50 days before the shop starts buying again).
But most of the ports don't consume materials, and in those ports once the Sell Price reaches 1 it is stuck there until players (or NPC bots) buy enough to get the shop stock below the high-water mark.

to answer my own question:
When the same Item ID appears twice in a ResourcesAdded array, then both entries apply. The daemon that processes these lists does not appear to notice or care that it already saw that item in that port previously, when it reaches the duplicate entry.

I've found more duplicate ResourcesAdded values in the Shops API (these are on us2, aka PVP Global):
Port=La Habana [38], Item=Iberian Dried Pork [790]
Port=Kingston / Port Royal [79], Item=Lancashire Iron [806]
Port=Les Gonaïves [93], Item=Fine Fabrics [824]
Port=La Tortue [96], Item=Provence Oak [829]
Port=Fajardo [116], Item=Iberian Dried Pork [790]
Port=Christiansted [129], Item=Norwegian Fox Fur [819]
Port=Gustavia [133], Item=Cape Coast Honey [833]
Port=La Désirade [139], Item=Languedoc Violins [825]
Port=Fort-Royal [156], Item=Corsican Mint [823]
Port=Carriacou [163], Item=Textile Machinery [811]
Port=Cartagena de Indias [212], Item=Spanish Dried Fruits [796]
Port=Atchafalaya [294], Item=Normandy Cider [827]
It is unclear what to do when the same item is found in the list twice. Should the correct value be taken as the first one in the list, the last one in the list, or the sum of all the entries with the same item id?
(sorry if formatting is bad, I still have that bug that removes all styles from the forum web pages)

Ever since the forum outage all I see now is raw text, without styles. This makes the forum very hard to read and some features (like going directly to unread posts in a thread) don't appear to work at all. I would attach a screenshot showing what I see except the "choose files... Click to choose files" link does nothing.
F5, Ctrl-F5 and Shift-F5 did not help. JavaScript is enabled. I tried opening this forum in IE rather than Chrome and got the same result.
Anybody know what I need to do to fix this? I assume it's just me seeing this otherwise I'd have expected to see complaints from others posted here already.

I really think this was something special, and more importantly it wasn't an event limited to just a few people in one night, it was nearly the entire French nation (at the time) over a several week period.
The defense of Pedernales in particular was glorious, and it became a point of French pride that we refused to allow it to fall without a fight, even if it meant sitting inside the port for 2 hours every night just in case a flag was launched against it. The other 22 hours of each day was packed with PvP, and it mattered -- it wasn't just sinking ships for fun, it was all-out war and it became our moral obligation to Sink All Pirates.

I think Vllad includes traders and crafters in the category of PvP players as long as they're willing to do their trading and crafting in potentially unsafe waters, in support of the greater war effort. This is one of the things that makes this such a good PvP game -- ship combat and logistics both play a role.

I don't think CCCP can afford to treat France as an equal. It would look bad and people might think all that saber-rattling was empty talk and start to re-evaluate their own relationships with the Danes.
So they will define a victory condition for themselves ("reduce France to one port!") and if they achieve it they will declare that they have won the war, and they will not be able to understand why we keep sinking their ships and stealing their cargoes even though they have already "won". I suppose the next step would be to demand the devs fix the game because it's obviously broken if people you have already defeated refuse to go away even though you took all their ports, and when the devs do nothing they will just have to quit the game because it's stupid and boring and the devs are stupid to make such a broken game that doesn't even let you win and they're going to go play another game which is way better anyway.

Also, I noticed that while the API indicates which ports are in which counties, it does not actually provide the *name* of the county (only the list of all the ports in the county). I found this a curious omission.

The "ResourcesAdded" array for the La Habana Shops entry has Item ID 790 (Iberian Dried Port) listed twice, once at the beginning of the array with a value of (67, 0.28) and again at the end of the array with a value of (62, 0.28).
What does it mean when the same item appears in the ResourcesAdded array twice? Should the final effective value be taken as (62, 0.28), (67, 0.28) or (62+67, 0.28).
This was the us2 server data if it matters.

I am not convinced that resource rarity is the best solution if the outcome we really want is for exceptional ships to be a smaller fraction of the total ships in use. So if 5000 ships are made and 4000 of those are exceptional, all resource rarity really does is make it so people make 500 ships instead (400 of which are exceptional). People will make fewer ships because of resource rarity, but the fraction of exceptional ships being made will still be the majority. In other words, the current implementation encourages people to make fewer ships, rather than making the same number of ships but at a lower quality level. In effect, players really only consider two grades of ships: exceptional ships worth keeping, and gray ships that are throwaway garbage. There's not much reason to make anything in between.
This is basically the same problem we had with first rates, how do we encourage people to use them less, and use other ships more? Limiting durability worked pretty well for this, by both increasing the frequency of ship replacement, and increasing the risk of losing regular upgrades when the ship was down to 1 durability.
So, what if ship quality affected ship durability? I think the outcome would be fewer Exceptional ships on the open sea, because players are generally reluctant to risk gold upgrades on a 1-dura ship. Fine and Mastercraft would have more of a tendency to be the workhorse qualities, just like Frigates and Third Rates.
Common would still be pretty rare, though. To make Common ships more common, I think the fine wood requirement should be entirely removed for those. Also, because labor is still an excellent throttle on production, the labor cost (in terms of notes) should be higher.
So we would end up with:
Basic - 5 dura, no notes or fine wood required
Common - 5 dura, 1 note required, but no fine wood
Fine - 4 dura, 2 notes required, and a small quantity of fine wood
Mastercraft - 3 dura, 4 notes required, twice as much fine wood as Fine
Exceptional - 2 dura, 8 notes required, twice as much fine wood as Mastercraft
My original thought was that Exceptional ships should have 1 durability only, but I think that may be going too far. Or perhaps that is exactly what is needed to make players not want to use them all the time.
The drop rate for fine wood should be high enough that shipbuilders can build a Fine ship every day. This will mean that an Exceptional ship can be built in 4 days, but that Exceptional ship will have half the durability (or a third, if you assume players avoid sailing 1-dura ships). So in terms of "duras a player is willing to lose per day" we would have:
Basic - no production limit
Common - no production limit (except notes)
Fine - 3 duras without risking upgrades, for 1 days' fine wood supply (3 losable dura per day)
Mastercraft - 2 duras without risking upgrades, for 2 days' fine wood supply (1 losable dura per day)
Exceptional - 1 dura without risking upgrades, for 4 days' fine wood supply (1/4 dura losable per day)
If Exceptional is 1 durability, then we have:
Basic - no production limit
Common - no production limit (except notes)
Fine - 2 duras without risking upgrades, for 1 days' fine wood supply (2 losable dura per day)
Mastercraft - 1 dura without risking upgrades, for 2 days' fine wood supply (1/2 losable dura per day)
Exceptional - upgrades always at risk of permanent loss (1/4 dura per day, upgrades also lost)
Note that I use the term "losable" here to mean "a durability that can be lost without also losing your non-permanent upgrades".

McAfee SiteAdvisor blocks that URL:
An unacceptable security risk is posed by this site.
McAfee Content Category: Phishing
McAfee Security Rating: Red
it looks like the loading bar displays, then the security screen comes up, so maybe something is being loaded from somewhere else with a problem?

sliders don't need to be unlimited, they just need to have higher limits than they do now.
sliders for coins should allow up to 120 coins in one click.
sliders for ingots should allow up to 120 ingots in one click (150 for iron ingots).
slider for iron fittings should go up to 100. probably carriages also should have similar limits.
planks, frame parts and wooden fittings should have much higher limits (750, 500, 250 respectively).
also, if you are looking at an item recipe and you have moved the slider to some value, and it indicates that you don't have enough of a component, then when you click that component the new slider should start at the position to make the smallest amount you need.
for example: you want to make 10 medium carriages (5 batches) and it says you need 25/10 iron fittings (25 needed but you have only 10, so you are short by 15). when you click from there into the iron fittings recipe, the slider should start at 16 (iron fittings batch size is 4, minimum 4 batches needed to make the 15 you lack). ir you don't have enough iron ingots to make 16 iron fittings, the same thing should happen when you click from there into the iron ingots recipe -- the slider should start at the position to make the minimum number of extra ingots to bring you up to having enough to make 16 iron fittings.